I recently finished a project helping a CPG organization within a large retail company implement a product portfolio management process. The company as a whole tends to avoid developing business processes, but this CPG organization recognized the need for greater process discipline around its product pipeline and work in-take. Any endeavor to implement portfolio management can be difficult due to the organizational change component, but one factor that makes it easier is to communicate portfolio value.

Portfolio communication is a significant component of good portfolio management and often requires communicating along the four PPM lifecycle steps shown below:

Communicate portfolio value

However, as it relates to managing organization change, to communicate portfolio value is to communicate how the portfolio process benefits the organization. Success stories must be shared to reinforce how new changes should be welcomed and adopted.

Communicate Portfolio Value Through Success Stories

Within the first few weeks of the new process, a project manager told his peers that the work in-take processes actually helped him determine that a new product he was about to propose was not a good project after all. He elaborated by saying that the extra rigor required him to ask tough questions about the value of the project, which led him to the conclusion that his proposed product was not worth bringing to market! Prior to a product portfolio approach, numerous project managers would have brought forth new product ideas with little governance or oversight. Now, with greater scrutiny over new product proposals, it was easier to determine early on whether a product idea was worth going after or not. This kind of testimony should be widely circulated throughout the organization to help communicate the value of the portfolio process.

Another project manager approached me recently to share another success story about how his project team believed that making a change to a single product would result in a one-time costs saving of $100,000. However, as a result of the increased cross-functional collaboration required by the new Stage-Gate process, the project team discovered that these changes could be applied to an entire product line resulting in an annual savings of $1,000,000. This was a huge win for the team and is another success story to help the entire organization adopt the Stage-Gate/product portfolio process.

Summary

To communicate portfolio value is not just about communicating the value of the portfolio, or of the individual project components in the portfolio, it also involves communicating the value of the entire portfolio process. This creates positive momentum for helping organizations adopt new processes, resulting in greater success in the future.

Who in your organization manages portfolio communication? How effective is the portfolio communication at your company?

Portfolio Review Meetings

Portfolio review meetings are a great way to review and assess the entire project portfolio with the governance team. Unfortunately in practice, these meetings can be overwhelming, time consuming, and unproductive. There are many ways to conduct a portfolio review meeting, but one of the key questions of the governance team is “what do they want to accomplish at the end of the portfolio review”? For some organizations, portfolio review meetings are about getting project status of every project in the portfolio. For other organizations, portfolio review meetings are designed to evaluate each project in the portfolio with the intention of updating priorities.

Options for Portfolio Review Meetings

With this background in mind, we can look at four options for conducting portfolio review meetings:

OPTION 1: A review of all in-flight projects, current status, relative priority, business value, etc. Some projects may be cancelled, but the primary purpose is to inform the LT of the current in-flight projects.

OPTION 2: A partial review of projects in the portfolio consisting of high-value/high-risk projects. This provides more in-depth information of critical initiatives and may result in a possible change of priority of certain projects.

OPTION 3: A high-level review of all projects in the portfolio with the intention of updating project priorities for every project in the portfolio.

OPTION 4: A review of portfolio scenarios that meet current business needs followed by a selection of a recommended portfolio

Option 4 comes courtesy of Jac Gourden of FLIGHTMAP in a 2012 blog post and is the best approach I have seen for conducting portfolio review meetings. I also have sat through long sessions (although not all-day sessions) of reviewing all the projects in the portfolio and it can be painstakingly tiring. Moreover, these types of portfolio review meetings wear out governance team members and do not yield much value. While there is certainly a time and a place for review the status of all projects or conducting a lengthy review for the purpose of re-prioritizing projects in the portfolio, taking a strategic view is the way to go. Rather than merely focusing on individual projects, a portfolio team can compile a few portfolio scenarios that should be reviewed by the governance team. In many instances, there is significant overlap between the portfolio scenarios, but the emphasis is on the business goals of the portfolio and how a portfolio scenario supports a certain goal. Some examples of portfolio scenarios include:

Revenue Growth Scenario

Customer Growth Scenario

Market Growth Scenario

Reduced R&D Spend Scenario

Balanced Portfolio Scenario

These scenarios are easier to produce when efficient frontier analysis is applied. Even after a portfolio recommendation is accepted, there is further work to screen out the projects not included in the portfolio, and in some cases to make worthy exceptions for some projects that would have otherwise been removed from the portfolio.

What do you think? Have you tried this approach before? How successful was it? Let me know.

Today’s Environment

Project portfolio management (PPM) helps organizations make decisions that move the needle toward achieving their strategic objectives. In order to make those decisions, senior leadership needs the right information at the right time. This is where PPM systems come in, providing the quality data helping to inform sound decision making. Unfortunately, many companies assume that merely implementing a PPM system will improve their ability to execute strategy. There’s more to it.

Point B’s Perspective

In order for PPM systems to add value, organizations need to consider five important factors: business drivers, reporting, data, processes and people.

Gate reviews are a critical component of project selection. A winning portfolio must contain winning projects, therefore the project governance board must be able to discriminate between good projects and great projects. The decision gate process enables the project governance board to review these projects based on preselected strategic criteria at the gate reviews of the decision gate process. At each of those gates, important project information is provided to the project governance board to make a go/no-go decision related to the project. Without this mechanism, unnecessary or poorly planned projects can enter the portfolio and bog down the work load of the organization, hampering the benefits realized from truly important and strategic projects.

The ability to screen out misaligned projects is based on the types of decision making criteria used for gate reviews. Another way to look at the criteria is that they act as gate review filters. For instance, some companies may have no filters and approve every project; another company may only judge projects based on financial contribution and screen out very fewer projects; whereas other companies will makes gate decisions based on financial contribution, investment risk, and resource availability. We can see this by the image below.

Types of Gate Review Filters

There are many types of decision making filters available for companies to use, the key is to apply the filters that match the organization’s current maturity and culture. Let’s take a look at a few gate review filters (not an exhaustive list):

1) Financial filter: this gate criteria requires some sort of financial analysis to determine the profitability (or value) of the project. Applying financial hurdle rates may be one way of screening out lower value projects. Using financial benefit (e.g. net present value) is one approach to rank ordering projects.

2) Strategic filter: most companies implementing PPM recognize the need to evaluate projects in light of strategic goals and objectives. However, if the criteria is not detailed enough, most projects can be shown to align to strategy to a certain extent.

3) Risk filters: risk criteria at gate reviews should really be thought of as investment risk. Detailed project risks may or may not be known, but based on the type of project being proposed and the initial analysis the riskiness (or risk nature) can be understood. Depending on the risk tolerance of the organization, more projects may be screened out based on the riskiness of the project.

4) Resource filters: a more advanced criteria is resource availability or the utilization of key resources who are currently unavailable. Since many organizations do an inadequate job of measuring resource utilization, this filter may not be used as often.

5) Portfolio filter: for simplicity, a portfolio filter takes an aggregate portfolio view when reviewing individual projects. It measures what the impact to the portfolio is rather than only evaluating the individual merits of the project. It also relates to the balance of the portfolio (short-term versus long-term, risky versus safe, good distribution among business units, etc.).

As organizations mature their project selection process, more gate review filters (criteria) should be used to ensure that right projects get included in the portfolio. More criteria often means fewer projects get approved which means that the project pipeline more closely resembles a “funnel” rather than a “tunnel” (see this post for details).

Project prioritization is one of the most common topics in portfolio management literature. Within the context of project prioritization is the matter of scoring models because scoring models are the most widely used approach to prioritize projects. Although there are a lot of opinions on the effectiveness of common scoring models, they are nonetheless the most common method for prioritizing projects. However, most people may not realize the many uses of a scoring model and how it drives better decision making beyond project prioritization. In this post, we will look at five uses of a scoring model.

1) Project prioritization is the most common reason for using scoring models. As we saw in a previous post, project prioritization is for resource allocation. Since portfolio management is about delivering the most business value through projects, it is logical to ensure that resources are spent on the most important work. Ranking projects helps provide a common understanding of what is most important in the organization and scoring models are one of the easiest ways of establishing a rank order. For more information on using prioritization scoring models to rank order projects, please see Mastering Project Portfolio Management.

2) A prioritization scoring model is also used for project selection. The idea is to rank projects from highest value to lowest value and select projects until resources run out. This approach has merits over other approaches that do not sufficiently take account of strategic drivers. However, it can be shown that even simple optimization techniques can yield a higher value portfolio at the same cost. For organizations that do not employ portfolio optimization techniques, using a scoring model to rank order projects and fund projects until resources runs out is a reasonable way to go.

3) Portfolio optimization is very useful for identifying higher-value portfolios than merely using scoring models as discussed in the previous paragraph. The scores for each project can represent a “utility score” which can then be used as the input for the optimization calculations. In this way, projects are optimized based on all the scoring inputs, not merely on net present value or some other financial estimate. For more information about this technique, please refer to Richard Bayney’s book Enterprise Project Portfolio Management: Building Competencies for R&D and IT Investment Success.

4) A prioritization scoring model can also be used to make go/no-go decisions at gate review meetings. There are at least two ways to accomplish this:

A) Organizations can predetermine a threshold score that projects must exceed in order to be considered for inclusion in the portfolio (known as a scoring hurdle).

B) An alternative approach is to use a scoring range to provide better input to the decision makers. In other words, if the scoring range were from 0 to 100, scores below 30 might represent high-risk/low-value investments that should otherwise be rejected, but may only get approved if there were other intangible factors not considered by the scoring model. Projects in the middle range of scores might be approved with more scrutiny, and projects in the upper range would likely get approved. The prerequisite to taking this approach is to have an adequate number of historical scores from past projects to compare against. Statistical analysis would further help refine this approach. Another assumption is that the scoring model would have to remain fairly consistent over time with few changes. Otherwise, historical scores could not be used to determine the correct range unless special adjustments are made to the scores.

5) Finally, scoring models provide the input to build risk-value bubble charts, which provide great visual information to senior leaders. The scoring model needs to contain both value elements and risk elements as inputs for the diagram. Normally, these scores are summed to become a single number, but with the risk-value bubble chart, we need to break out the total value score and the total risk score in order to correctly plot the data on a chart. With further data elements such as strategic alignment and expected cost (or return), more information can be displayed on the bubble charts (see example below).

After reading the first three chapters of A Fish In Your Ear, I stopped reading it for about a year. A lot of time is spent discussing the psychology of decision making, which is not often covered in the PPM literature, but it wasn’t enough to keep my attention. I came back to the book a year later and am glad I did because the best part of the book is in chapters 4-7.

Chapter 4 describes the importance of managing portfolio data, data integrity, and how to collect the right data. He opens up the chapter with a great quote by Bill Gates, “How you gather, manage, and use information will determine if you win or lose.” Early on Menard mentions that an organization’s central nervous system is its information management system and that an organization is only as effective as its knowledge is good. After a solid discussion on variables, data integrity, data-quality influencers, and other items he concludes the chapter on data collection. The list of questions in this section is one of the gems of the book. Menard does a great job of highlighting how asking the right questions can uncover the data needs of the organization.

Chapter 5 builds on chapter 4 and discusses decision criteria. Having the right information is important, but it is even more important that senior leaders have defined and agreed-upon criteria to discriminate between projects. In the middle of the chapter he gives a great explanation for why having clear objectives is a necessity for making the right decisions. “Once we clarify our objective and can clearly state and compare it to alternatives, it becomes a guiding star helping us navigate to our chosen destination.”

Chapter 6 continues with a good discussion of data visualization. I fully agree that in order to make sense of so much data, it has to be visualized. Not only GenSight, but companies like Tableau are working hard to help users visualize data. The results can be very enlightening. In this chapter, Menard discusses the various elements to help visualize data: color, shapes, size, and matrices. He concludes with visual rules: give people what they want, show what matters, make it rich, make it valid, and have a purpose.

Chapter 7 focuses on portfolio selection. He brings up two burning questions early in the chapter: “will this portfolio deliver our strategic goals?” and “do we have enough appropriate resources to execute the portfolio?” The first question touches the matter of what the organization should do, the second on what they can do. The second half of the chapter provides a great discussion on the matter of portfolio optimization.

In short, chapters 4-7 of A Fish In Your Ear are worth the price of the book and provide some of the best explanations of collecting and utilizing portfolio data that I have read. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Prioritization is about focus—where to assign resources and when to start the work. It is not about scoring methods and ranking mechanisms. Without defining project priorities, it is difficult to effectively distribute personnel to carry out the highest valued projects. Project priorities enable management to assign their employees to the most important projects. Gaylord Wahl of Point B says that priorities create a ‘true north’ which establishes a common understanding of what is important. Prioritizing projects enables organizations to make the best use of company resources. Without a clear and shared picture of what matters most, lower-value projects can move forward at the expense of high-value projects. Again, prioritization is about focus—WHERE to assign resources and WHEN to start the work. Prioritization and resource allocation go hand in hand.

In the diagram above we see that prioritization relates to resource priority and schedule priority. Resource priority drives the question, “where are we going to invest our resources now?” The fundamental resources are money and people. Since there is often more work to be done than there are resources available, senior leadership needs to provide guidance of where to investment money and where to allocate human resources. This requires an understanding of how to get the most important work done within existing capacity constraints. However, not all projects can be initiated immediately. Prioritization can also help direct the timing and sequencing of projects. In some cases, high priority projects may have other dependencies or resource constraints that require a start date in the future. In other cases, lower priority projects get pushed out into the future. In both cases, schedule priority helps answer the question “when can we start project work?” Having the right human resources available to do project work is a critical success factor. High priority projects have a higher likelihood of success due to adequate staffing. Lower priority projects may face more resource contention and have a higher risk of project delays due to inadequate resource time. Lower priority projects that get pushed out into the future have an even lower likelihood of success since these projects face challenges around project initiation and higher resource contention.

The purpose of prioritization is to allocate resources to the most important work. Prioritization provides focus—WHERE to assign resources and WHEN to start the work. The goal of prioritization is to accomplish the most important work to deliver maximum business value. Although prioritization is a critical need in many organizations, in the next post we will highlight cases where prioritization is a waste of time.

The PMI Standard for Portfolio Management Third Edition is the first edition that is worth buying. Having read the 1st and 2nd editions and reviewed the exposure draft for the 2nd and 3rd, PMI has come a long way with the third edition. Nearly all the major components of portfolio management are referenced in this edition (gate reviews being the most significant omission). At the time of this review, I am preparing for the PfMP exam and have read over most of the 3rd edition twice and have studied several sections in detail. It is still not perfect as there are several inconsistencies and items I consider too theoretical (hence the 4 out of 5 star rating), but overall it is a worthy addition to the portfolio management library.

Chapters 1-2 do a great job of giving an overview of portfolio management with the roles and responsibilities needed to make it work. Chapter 3 also does a pretty good job of creating a structure around which to organize the remaining chapters by setting each of the five knowledge areas (Portfolio Strategic Management, Portfolio Governance Management, Portfolio Performance Management, Portfolio Communication Management, and Portfolio Risk Management) in a table with the three process groups (Defining, Aligning, and Authorizing/Controlling). Chapters 4-5 in my opinion are the weakest parts in the book. There are some great additions such as the portfolio strategic plan and the portfolio roadmap, but some of the strategic processes seem out of order (e.g. prioritizing projects before they have been evaluated by a governance board) or are omitted (e.g. gate reviews). In addition, the Portfolio Charter deliverable is just too theoretical for most organizations to adopt. Chapter 6 does a good job of addressing resource capacity management and benefits realization (two big omissions in previous editions). I found chapter 7 to be very useful related to portfolio communication and I got fresh insight on portfolio risk management from chapter 8.

In short, the PMI Standard for Portfolio Management Third Edition is worth buying and offers great information for portfolio management practitioners.

Book review of IT Governance by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004)

Synopsis

“IT governance is the most important factor in generating business value from IT.”

“Good governance design allows enterprises to deliver superior results on their IT investments.”

“Effective IT governance is the single most important predictor of the value an organization generates from IT”

The quotes above should draw attention to the importance of well defined and well communicated IT governance. Although not exciting, IT governance helps generate greater value from IT. The authors define governance as “specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in using IT.” “Governance determines who makes the decisions. Management is the process of making and implementing the decisions.”

Much of the book is spent developing two questions. The first question focuses on the types of decisions that must be made to ensure effective management and use of IT. The authors answer this question by describing five key areas of IT governance that require decision making:

IT Principles—a related set of high level statements about how IT is used in the business.

IT Architecture—the organizing logic for data, applications, and infrastructure, captured in a set of policies, relationships, and technical choices to achieve desired business and technical standardization and integration.

IT infrastructure—determining shared and enabling services.

Business Application needs—specifying the business need for purchased or intentionally developed IT applications.

IT Investment and Prioritization—choosing which initiatives to fund and how much to spend.

The second question addressed in the book focuses on who makes these decisions. The authors address this question by describing six archetypes (decision-making styles) used by enterprises in IT decision making:

Business Monarchy—top managers

IT Monarchy—IT specialists

Feudal—each business unit making independent decisions

Federal—combination of the corporate center and the business units with or without IT people involved

IT Duopoly—IT group and one other group (for example, top management or business unit leaders)

Anarchy—isolated individual or small group decision making

Much research and analysis was made by the authors in connecting the decisions being made with the right decision makers. They conducted an extensive survey of over 250 companies across 23 counties. Based on the results, they concluded that the best performers conducted IT governance differently from the low performers and drew conclusions of what distinguished the two groups.

Commentary

IT Governance was very useful to me personally as it is the most thorough work on the topic that I have read and provided a lot of good insight into how to make governance work. Project portfolio management (PPM) is tightly linked with IT governance, “Portfolio management without governance is an empty concept” (Datz). In order to make portfolio management processes successful a proper governance structure must be in place. Project governance is very much about the types of decisions being made and the people who participate in the decision making. The Project Management Institute’s Standard for Portfolio Management 2nd Edition briefly discussed governance but did not go into the same level of detail as this book. Another well respected PPM expert, James Pennypacker, developed a portfolio management maturity model which identifies governance as a key criteria. This book strongly supplements that maturity model.

This book enlarged my view of IT governance particularly with the five key areas of: IT Principles, IT Architecture, IT infrastructure, Business Application Needs, IT Investment and Prioritization. PPM is very focused on the last area of investment and prioritization, but the four preceding areas lead up to the point of making the investment decisions. It was very clear that a governance structure needs to be set up to account for all five areas.

This book also strengthened my view concerning the people involved with governance. I liked the quote stating, “IT governance is a senior management responsibility. If IT is not generating value, senior management should first examine its IT governance practices—who makes decisions and how the decision makers are accountable.” Governance cannot be delegated to someone else. The authors made it very clear that one of the critical success factors of IT governance is the involvement with senior/executive leadership. Without the adequate leadership, solid governance is likely to fail. In addition, “If business leaders do not assume responsibility for converting [IT capabilities] into value, the risk of failure is high. With high risk comes the likelihood of frustrated business leaders who often respond by replacing the IT leadership or abdicating further by outsourcing the whole ‘IT problem’”. Here the point was made that outsourcing IT may come out of a frustration by the business leaders with IT. Yet, the source of the frustration may very well lie in the poor governance structures established.

Another striking point that affects my current work is the need for improved communication with senior management. Governance communication cannot happen too much. The authors found that “the best predictor of IT governance performance is the percentage of managers in leadership positions who can accurately describe IT governance.” They found that most senior managers could not explain their own governance processes, which would explain why their IT governance doesn’t work properly. These points reinforce my need to continually educate senior management and communicate both the process and the results of our governance procedures so that we have greater project success.

The book was reasonably well written. Although the content was great, I felt that the case studies and diagrams were really lacking. I normally like case studies, but I do not feel that the cases used in this book added any value to me. Many of the diagrams could have also been explained better. As far as improvements, the topic of project portfolio management was barely discussed and is quite important in terms of executing strategic change within an organization. I overlooked it because of the book’s value to the topic of governance, but I definitely feel the authors should have spent more time on this topic. Otherwise, this is a great book for a topic that is overlooked but very necessary. I would definitely recommend it to anyone that is involved with portfolio management or any part of IT governance.

Mastering Project Portfolio Management is focused on helping organizations master the decision making science of project portfolio management and is best suited for mature organizations wanting to perform advanced portfolio management. It is also great for MBA or Executive MBA students wanting to learn how to develop an organizational data-driven decision making process. Mastering Project Portfolio Management is perhaps the strongest book on the market related to the decision-making science of PPM; the authors state in chapter 1 that “the essence of PPM is reasoned decision making”. The authors arranged for readers to access Expert Choice, a leading decision making software tool, and include significant material on how to utilize the software to make better portfolio management decisions. In addition, each chapter of the book is based on a portfolio management framework they developed, which helps provide structure for the material.

Chapter 1 provides a great overview of PPM. In one example, the authors compare portfolio management with a ship captain ordering course corrections to the helmsman. “As strategic plans change, the portfolio must change, requiring the portfolio process to be adaptable, flexible, and responsive to rapidly adjust its limited resources in an ever changing global market place.” Chapter 2 covers four key steps for establishing the strategic foundation for solid portfolio management (defining the mission, developing the vision, establishing goals, determining objectives).

In my mind, chapters 3 and 4 are the real heart of the book as it goes into detail on the importance of ratio scale measurements and using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritizing objectives and projects. “The ability to structure decisions, measure options, and synthesize the measurements to derive priorities is critical to implementing an effective PPM process and in selecting optimal portfolios.” This book provides the clearest explanation on why ratio scale measurements should be used and how AHP enhances portfolio decision making.